Blizzard’s decision to delete every PvP realm in Europe and merge us all into a single PvE megaserver is nothing but punishment. And what are we being punished for? For the faction imbalance and server collapse that Blizzard themselves caused.
It was your job to keep realms balanced and healthy. Instead, you ignored the problem for years. You let servers rot, you never intervened with population controls, and you did nothing to protect the health of the game. Now you turn around and say: “Well, servers are 99% one faction, so PvP doesn’t really exist.” That is not a justification—it’s a pathetic excuse to cover up your own neglect. And the punishment falls entirely on us: the complete removal of PvP realms in Europe.
And let’s be clear: PvP realms have always been the most populated. They still are today. Even players who don’t raid or focus on PvE choose PvP servers because that’s where the game feels alive. If you gave us the choice, the PvP server would fill faster than PvE, just like it always has. Taking that choice away is nothing less than betrayal.
To make matters worse, you keep boasting about your “technology” to merge every server into one—when at release, you couldn’t even manage solo realms without weeks of crippling lag. You couldn’t even fix a bug with PvP vendors’ positions. Instead of properly resolving it, you hacked together an embarrassing workaround and then had the audacity to present it in the patch notes as if it were some kind of major accomplishment. That is the level of “tech” we’re supposed to trust with a megaserver?
And while you’re doing all this, you spend your time trying to shut down private servers. Of course you do—because they terrify you. And with good reason: small teams of thirty people manage to deliver a healthier, more authentic experience than your multi-billion-dollar company. Instead of being afraid of them, maybe you should learn from them.
Stop punishing EU players for problems you created. Stop blaming us for your failure to manage servers, and stop pretending this is for our benefit. At the very least, give us the option of a PvP server. Anything less is proof that Blizzard has abandoned both Classic and the community that kept it alive.
Are you serious? You’re complaining about the “death of PvP” when what you’re really mourning is the loss of your ability to grief low-level players and corpse camp someone with a 5-to-1 advantage. Let’s be honest, that was never “PvP.” That was just bullying, and it’s pathetic that you miss it.
If you actually wanted to engage in real player-versus-player combat, you’d go play Arenas or Battlegrounds. That’s where skill actually matters. In there, you can’t rely on being 20 levels higher than your opponent or having four friends to back you up while you teabag a lone quester. It’s an even playing field where your gear, your class knowledge, and your strategy are put to the test. That is genuine PvP. Ganking someone who has zero chance of fighting back is just a power fantasy for players who can’t handle a fair fight.
The reason those servers became 99% one faction is because of the toxic environment that people like you created. Nobody wants to log in just to be farmed by groups of max-level players while they’re trying to level. It’s not fun, it’s not engaging, and it’s not a healthy game environment. You drove everyone away, and now you’re crying because you have no one left to torment.
So, frankly, it’s a damn good thing the PvP servers are gone. It’s a solution to a problem that the “PvP community” itself created through its own toxicity. Stop complaining that Blizzard is taking away your toys and go learn how to fight in a real competitive environment. Maybe then you’ll understand what actual PvP is.
If all I wanted was instanced, perfectly balanced fights like Arenas or BGs, I’d go play a MOBA and queue from a launcher. That’s not what World of Warcraft is. WoW has always been about the open world, the chaos, the danger of crossing paths with the other faction — that’s what gave the game its identity and why PvP servers were always the most populated.
And don’t try to say I’m just “crying about losing my ability to grief.” I play Alliance on a Horde-majority server. I’ve spent my entire Classic experience being outnumbered and outgunned, and I enjoyed it. That imbalance created tension, rivalries, and memorable moments you simply don’t get in battleground lobbies.
Battlegrounds and Arenas are side games. World PvP was the beating heart of Classic server identity. If you don’t understand that, maybe you’re the one who belongs in a MOBA, not WoW.
So you chose to play on the losing team and actually enjoyed it? Congratulations, you’re one in a thousand. That doesn’t change the fact that for the other 999 players, the experience was miserable enough that they quit or transferred, leaving you on a dead server. Your personal preference for a “challenge” doesn’t justify a broken system that hemorrhages players. The health of the entire server ecosystem is more important than your niche gameplay style.
You romanticize “chaos” and “tension,” but let’s call it what it really was: unplayable. The “memorable moments” you’re talking about were mostly massive, lag-inducing zergs of the dominant faction rolling over quest hubs, making it impossible for the minority faction to complete a single quest or even leave a flight path. There’s no skill or glory in that; it’s just a numbers game, and it was solved by players consolidating on one faction to “win.”
You killed World PvP yourselves. The community min-maxed the fun out of it, turning every server into a one-sided slaughterhouse. That’s not the “beating heart” of an MMO; it’s a corpse. The game you’re defending doesn’t exist anymore, and it hasn’t for years.
Blizzard isn’t deleting a thriving world of conflict. They’re just putting a headstone on a graveyard that players like you refuse to leave. If you want a real fight against other players, the Arena and Battleground queues are waiting. If you just want to reminisce about the “good old days” of being corpse-camped, you’re welcome to it, but don’t pretend it’s a viable future for the game.
So your “logic” is that because Blizzard let server balance spiral out of control, the solution is to erase PvP realms entirely and punish the players who actually enjoyed them? That’s not fixing anything, that’s admitting failure.
Yes, I played Alliance on a Horde-majority realm and I enjoyed it — because that was World of Warcraft. It wasn’t meant to be sterile or “perfectly balanced.” It was messy, it was brutal, it was unpredictable — and that’s why PvP realms were always the most populated. People rolled there knowing it would be harder, because that’s where the game felt alive.
And don’t twist “chaos” into “unplayable.” When a hub got raided, when rival guilds clashed, when a questing zone turned into a battlefield — those moments created stories that people still talk about today. Battleground queues and Arenas don’t do that. They’re just instances you grind and forget.
As for imbalance: of course people want to jump on the winning bus, just like in every game. That’s human nature. Which is exactly why it was Blizzard’s job to manage populations from the top — to step in, enforce balance, and protect server health. They had the tools and the responsibility, but they didn’t use them.
Now they’re punishing the EU player base for their own failures and pretending it’s a “solution.” It isn’t. PvP servers didn’t die because players wanted them gone, they died because Blizzard let them rot. Deleting them now is just an admission of incompetence.
You’re right about one thing: Blizzard failed miserably at maintaining server balance. But that ship sailed years ago, and now you’re crying about it
You’re romanticizing what it was like to be the underdog. That “messy and unpredictable” world was great back in 2005 when nobody knew what they were doing. Today’s player base has optimized all the fun and randomness out of the game. “Jumping on the winning bus” wasn’t a small phenomenon; it was a systematic process by which players killed their own servers to create single-faction PvE paradises.
Those “stories” and “epic moments” of yours were, 90% of the time, the complete destruction of someone else’s game experience. When you and your guild were “creating a story” by taking over a raid entrance for an hour, hundreds of other players simply couldn’t play the game they were paying for. That’s not a “living world”; it’s bad game design combined with a toxic player culture.
And yes, Blizzard should have intervened. But how? With forced transfers? By locking character creation for the more popular faction, preventing friends from playing together? The community would have screamed then, too. Players demanded freedom, and when they got it, they used it to completely destroy the balance.
Blizzard gave players the tools to dig their own grave, and the players used them with enthusiasm. This isn’t a punishment; it’s a consequence. Those PvP servers are already DöööööööööööD… Blizzard is just pulling the plug and clearing out the bodies.
You’re acting like this was all inevitable, that players “dug their own grave” and Blizzard is just sweeping up the mess. That’s not how MMOs work. Of course players will min-max and chase advantage—that’s human nature. It’s the developer’s job to design systems that keep the world alive in spite of that. Blizzard just never did.
And no, the only options weren’t ugly punishments like forced transfers or hard locks. The simple answer was rewards. Give the underdog faction XP and reputation bonuses. Make honor gains faster. Add cosmetic incentives, cheaper mounts, even priority queues for the smaller side. Plenty of other MMOs have done this. It’s not some impossible problem, it’s just something Blizzard ignored.
As for world PvP being “toxic,” that was the whole point of a PvP realm. Unpredictable, messy, sometimes frustrating—but also where the best memories and biggest stories came from. That’s why PvP realms were always the most populated. People valued that chaos more than safe, sterile PvE.
And here’s the heart of it: when players were given a choice between PvE and PvP realms, they chose PvP in overwhelming numbers. Now Blizzard is taking that choice away entirely. That’s not a “natural consequence.” That’s Blizzard deciding for us, because they couldn’t be bothered to fix the problem.
Oh, so rewards would have fixed everything? Are you serious?
The Classic player doesn’t care about a 10% XP buff or a cheaper mount if it means every quest takes twice as long because of constant ganking and corpse camping. The only thing that matters is getting to the endgame quickly and finding groups there. That’s why everyone dogpiles on the faction with the biggest player pool. No cosmetic reward can make up for that fundamental advantage.
And stop pining for 2005 already. Your “chaos” and “stories” only worked when the servers were at least somewhat balanced. When they became 99-to-1, all that was left was the toxicity without any of the fun. Your version of “epic” PvP is probably attacking some quester from the air 3-on-1 and then teeabagging their corpse. Great pvp, clap clap.
And your main point: “players chose PvP servers”. Yes, they did. And right after that, they chose to systematically destroy them by all moving to the same side.
You can’t burn down your own house and then blame others for being homeless. Players made their choice, and the consequence of that choice was dead, one-sided servers. Blizzard isn’t taking away your choice anymore—they’re just taking away the illusion that those are still “PvP” servers. They haven’t been for years.
Who are you kidding or trying to, mate? There’s the only one reason everybody flock to a PvP server - it’s guarantied population. And when bullying starts everyone moves to the strongest faction on that one server to avoid it and that’s why we have mono-faction servers. I personally think and hope that many ppl will agree with me that creating PvP servers for Classic was the blizzard mistake right from the beginning. I mean we have War Mode in retail for the reason.
You don’t get to decide what players would or wouldn’t do. History already showed it—free transfers plus something like bonus XP or rep will make the majority switch sides. That’s exactly how you fix imbalance, not by deleting PvP realms.
Stop pretending players “chose” to destroy their own servers. Nobody planned that it was just herd behavior, people naturally following the bigger side. And that’s exactly why it’s Blizzard’s responsibility to manage balance. Blaming players for it is just dodging the real issue.
You’re making my point I don’t even need to answer. Up until now, players always had the choice: PvE or PvP. Blizzard removing that choice is exactly the issue.
No one is removing your choice, you still can enable PvP flag and prance in the openworld to your hearts desire and have fight with ppl who want to have a fight. You just can’t bully anyone into the fight, that’s all. What bliz did is just clarify that the things are the way they are, nothing more. Even on our sad realm where my faction is roughly 20% of whole population WPvP is basically nonexistent except for some sad guys bullying lowlevels. On the realms like Firemaw or Gehennas WPvP is the thing of days long gone.
You can play however you want with your PvE flag, that’s your choice. But it would’ve cost Blizzard nothing to also add a single, unlayered PvP realm ,even with a long queue. That way players who actually want that environment still have the option, instead of having it erased completely. And you know damn well it would’ve been the first server to fill up.
They only bad thing that I can see here is that problems with names and guild transfers, guildbanks and etc. As for PvP realms - if you look at the population of all the current EU PvP realms you will notice that not one of them except for locked ones has any good horde/alliance ratio. The only “alive” servers with somewhat significant population that have that good ration is PVE servers. Not a single one PvP server with good ration. That means exactly that - only some die hard wpvp fans want PvP servers and no one else want it. Numbers tells it all and you can’t win againbst numbers. I guess that that only strange thing is the RP server, I’m not sure if RP flag means anything in technical terms but it seems to me that this is only formality and this is in fact PVE server too, but I could be wrong. Anyway I don’t see the any reason to consolidate it into one big megaserver if there’s any actual RP involved and there’s some technical details making up for some enchanced player ineration between faction, I don’t know really. But because there’s not a single balanced PvP server in EU as opposed to US, with their Grobulus server, I guess that Blizzard really saw no point of maintaining that fiction. And of course if enoguh player voice their desire for new PvP server - bliz probably will do that. Not enough voices for that right now though.
You’re missing the whole point. Players don’t “decide to imbalance” a server it just happens naturally because people follow the bigger side. That’s normal herd behavior in any MMO. The responsibility to keep servers healthy has always been Blizzard’s, not the players’. Using today’s broken ratios as proof that “nobody wants PvP” is just Blizzard’s neglect talking, not the truth.
It’s Blizzard’s responsibility to keep the servers balanced not the players’. The imbalance didn’t happen because people “planned” it, it happened because Blizzard never stepped in to manage it.
Maybe so, but then again how does it relate to PvP/PVE? I mean they can’t very well manage balance on any existing realm because, frankly, even with free transfers or even if they propose free race change (which they didn’t but that’s beside the point) - people will refuse to do so because people won’t lift a finger to do so when they already have established community. So to make population “balanced” they first need to remove all current population from all the servers (which they doing) and only after that they can create new PvP realm with the system they introduced in Anniversary (which worked so far for PvP realms there if you care to look). And then again - do you see hundreds of voices flocking to the forums to voice support PvP realms? So far it not even a half-hundred on both EU/US sides so again numbers tells everything.
